They’re all Greeks to me

Although I’ve been interested in wargaming since I was twelve years old I’ve never really dabbled in the ancient period. I did have quite a few Romans and Britons when Airfix first released them but I never replaced these with any metal figures when I entered my ‘serious’ wargaming phase. I may have been put off by playing a game with one of my school friends who insisted on pushing heaps of Airfix Robin Hood figures around the table alleging they were Carthaginian veteran spearmen. I think if you can’t be bothered to stand the toy soldiers up you really shouldn’t be playing wargames at all.

AG/7 Officer waving sword

AG/10 Hoplite thrusting with sword

AG/11 Hoplite thrusting with spear

AG/13 Hoplite marching

As a result of this I don’t know very much about the various Ancients periods and was certainly made to feel a bit inadequate when observing WRG competition games back in the 80s. The games didn’t look like much fun and always seemed to be small scale affairs rather than the large pitch battles I imagined from my limited knowledge of Hannibal, Alexander and Caesar. About ten years ago I did buy a copy of Warhammer Ancient Battles which looked more like the sort of rules I might enjoy to play. I even painted up a few 28mm Carthaginians (and based them so they stood up!) but not long after this I was seduced by the Hinton Hunt’s and Hannibal’s lads were boxed up and forgotten.

Now some of you may not be aware that Hinton Hunt actually did produce a range of 20mm Ancient figures. It wasn’t a very big range but covered Greeks, Persians, Romans and Celts so when this lot came up on eBay last week I couldn’t resist particularly as nobody else bid on them. It’s a nice little batch of figures as it includes one of each type of Greek figure released. Not much use from a wargaming point of view as this really is a tiny army however it’s really interesting to see them as I’m sure you’ll agree.